The Best Solution for People and Communications

CALL – TEXT – E-MAIL

Raffy @ (2) 501-3025 or 0927-726-9949 * raffy@kunnect.com

What is your business all about?

Is it a small call center, probably 10 or 20 seats, or even just 5 seats, running telemarketing campaigns in one or two shifts but changing every three months or so to a new sales program? However, being small means not having the army of analysts, trainers and assessors to support your telemarketing team, not to mention the need for one or two other people needed to generate daily reports that your client needs — and your report as well.

Is it a mid-sized or large call center that has recently gotten the opportunity to add another campaign but is caught between deciding to invest additional hardware, software and office fixtures or letting go of the opportunity? Let’s face it–you have no idea if this new campaign will continue operating until it pays off the additional investment you need to expand.

Is it a branch office of a multinational corporation that’s recently been tasked to take on support functions for your geographic region or other regions in the world? It’s great to know such large enterprises may give you the funds to setup an entire department dedicated to the new task; however, it’s also noteworthy that such funds reduces your annual or future budget which is not really good news. And because I.T. isn’t your core competence, would it really make sense for you to employ a large group of technical wizards that also becomes your responsibility?

Is it a company that does business with other companies abroad? Perhaps, buying and selling goods? Exporting to other countries? Outsourced manufacturing or production for well-known companies? However good (or bad) business is, sometimes your communications infracstructure also limit your potential. Maybe other outsourced production facilities in other countries would want to collaborate with you more but are hesitant to do so because of international telecommunications costs, especially with the Philippines as one of the few countries charging high tarrifs on inbound calls. Perhaps getting the part-time assistance of international consultants to help you solve process problems is key to expanding but the cost-burden of setting up an effective communications system is a detriment.

Is it a company that’s trying to penetrate other countries, selling products or services made in the Philippines? If this is so, it also means you’re already thinking of heavily investing (or have invested) in setting up a series of offices in the foreign country, spending on travel, board and lodging for many out-of-base employees, including additional benefits. These all means you will need to generate more sales to pay off this high cost of selling to a new market.

There are many other scenarios and situations you are in besides what I’ve enumerated above, whether as a smaller part in your organization or hitting it head-on on what’s happening in your company. Whatever the case may be, people will always tell you there is always a solution (or sets of solutions) to every problem. Unfortunately, how expensive those solutions are is a major consideration for employing such solution.

Enter Kunnect, probably the best, real, inexpensive piece of solution for your organization’s need to solve a problem or grab hold of an opportunity that involves people and communications.

By traditional definition, Kunnect is a hosted call center solution. But by usage, and by that I mean my experience as a user, it is a hosted sales, marketing, service and support solution that immediately connects your users to you and provides you with the necessary analytical tools to correctly decide and improve your processes for your end-users, colleagues, suppliers, partners, collaborators and, most importantly, your clients.

“What the heck does ‘hosted’ mean?” Simply defined, the hardware and software does not reside in your premises–it sits in a secured facility where only you and your organization have access to its functionalities, tools and data. This means you do not have to invest large amounts of money to acquire an opportunity that may not last forever. The latter phrase just means there is always a risk to run a new opportunity–you do not have a crystal ball to define the specific end-result. So, rather than invest or buy too much for something you are not guaranteed (remember, it’s only death and taxes), why not just lease the entire solution first and decide to buy later on when you’ve recovered enough funds to do so, are guaranteed that the outcome is great and you’ve overcome the phase where the benefits already outweigh the risks?

Hosted also means Kunnect is a fail-safe and redundant solution. It has multiple networks of servers (sometimes called “server farms”) in four distinct geographical locations around the world: the United States, Canada, France and Germany.

It’s a call center solution because many of its customers are call centers companies all around the world. It was built, developed and enhanced for this market. However, non-call center businesses who constantly deal directly with its customers, suppliers and clients started seeing Kunnect as a wonderful yet inexpensive solution to their needs. Who are these users of Kunnect? Sorry, but Kunnect can never tell. Remember, the key to fail-safe and optimum data security for a service provider like Kunnect is not letting the public know where their telecommunications pass and its data rests. In today’s hype of terrorism and corporate espionage, it’s best to be safe than sorry. Let me just assure you that Kunnect was originally a company in Germany that bought the softare system from its developers, Proximo Systems Inc., and transformed it into a hosted solution for mid-sized and large enterprises. Because of this German company’s success, Proximo Systems bought the German company and replicated its technology in other countries.

Kunnect started from a group of experienced engineers and operations experts getting together to create something better than Avaya, Oracle, Five-9, Call Center Anywhere, Stratasoft and the rest of ’em software-based systems. Better doesn’t necessarily mean all the bells and whistles you can think of–that’s too much of a processing burden for a solution to work efficiently. Kunnect just left the basic, rudimentary tools to make their solution an effective one; this also reduced the cost to lease it. Call centers need great efficiency, fantastic productivity in its workforce and can realistically (or effectively) operate their business the way they want and need to. That’s what Kunnect has consistently been doing, a continuous task of enhancing their solution to meet the challenges of the changing times. Because of Kunnect’s success in delivering the best solution for the call center industry, it also works to the best of its abilities in the general business environments, like the examples I mentioned above.

I have defined only a fraction of what Kunnect can do for your business but I hope I have given you the basic idea of what Kunnect promises to deliver: effective customer interaction, efficient workforce operations and reliable, useful information anytime, anywhere. Now, it’s time for costs.

For $50 a month, you can fill up one workstation with three employee-shifts, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to call your customers, receive calls from your customers, suppliers or collaborators, encode data, process information, listen and review the recorded conversation over and over again, recall voicemails left by people who tried to call, post automated reminder calls, send an automated broadcast message to your customers, dump a list of numbers in the database and let the Kunnect dialer predict which number dialed has someone answering the phone and immediately passing the call to your employee before the customer finishes saying “hello” (Whew! That was long), automatically forward calls to any phone in the world, setup several telephone numbers and toll free numbers anywhere in the world so that customers local to that country will call you anytime without worrying about long-distance costs… I think you get my drift. This is what Kunnect calls their “Metered Plan.” For $50 a month per license, you get all these tools. However, Kunnect bills you per minute of any calls made to the destination country. Now, you may think this is where Kunnect makes the big bucks. Not really. To call anywhere in Canada or the U.S., it will only cost you three U.S. cents per minute, four U.S. cents per minute to call Singapore, Ireland and Spain, and so goes the list. The Philippines is #143 in the list of 232 countries and networks, including the use of satellite-based Iridium, from the least expensive rate.

For $199 a month, you can have and do everything mentioned in the previous paragraph but using an unlimited amount of incoming and outgoing calls from and to the United States and Canada. This is called the “Unlimited Plan” and many call centers use this plan for all of its projects that involve the two countries in North America because they consume quadruple that amount in volume of calls.

Kunnect requires a prepaid deposit of $200 per license and a one-time setup fee of $750. At first, the $200 sounded like a real estate deal until an experience of totally stopping the use of Kunnect made it become okay to pay a deposit (I’ll explain below). Also, the setup fee is one-time. If your call center or business decides to expand, you don’t need to pay any extra setup fee.

Kunnect has been used by three centers and one small business in the Philippines. One center conducted several telemarketing campaigns for U.S. clients and leased the use of Kunnect’s Unlimited Plan because it employed it’s Predictive Dialer function, the means to which Kunnect dials several numbers all at the same time and immediately passes the calls to an available Agent when the call is answered–using a formula that involves many factors to predict how many of the simultaneous calls will be answered, how many Agents will be free during the times of answered calls and so on.

Two of the three centers leased the Metered Plan because their campaigns involved calls going to and coming from non-North American countries. One of these centers ran a project that required Kunnect to call numbers from more than 50 countries at several time zones from a database provided by its client. The call quality never degraded.

The small business manufactured a product being sold in some of the East Asian countries and provided telephone numbers local to those countries for its distributors to call them anytime.

None of these companies encountered problems in call quality — no choppy lines or echoes. 99% of the calls were clear. This is because Kunnect’s nearest network is located in a technology building called “One Wilshire”. This is the single point of entry in the United States for all subterranean telecommunications cables going through the Pacific Ocean. This means that this entry point is the first telecommunications hop into the United States for all Philippine telecommunications companies such as PLDT, Globe, Smart, Digitel, Sun, Eastern Telecom, etc. This is also where Kunnect has co-located its network of servers so that anyone in the Philippines using Kunnect is virtually connected to its Wilshire servers without having to “hop” to other internet nodes in the U.S. You get instantaneous and quick access to both its data and voice servers. However, it’s also mentioned above that Kunnect hosts three other networks of servers in other countries. The advantage of this is reducing the number of hops between telcom and telephone companies in between the Wilshire servers and your destination number, thus increasing the quality of the call.

Workspresso Inc. was the first user of Kunnect in the Philippines, setting up and managing a call center in Makati City that conducted telemarketing campaigns for several U.S. clients on an on-and-off method. Because Kunnect does away with long-term contracts, Workspresso was in no pressure to have standby (but usually lousy) campaigns just in case the current and good one had to stop. So, if your project ends and the next best one happens to start a month or two later, you do not have to pay for the idle month (unlike all other hosted solution providers). “Stop and Start Anytime” also means “Pay Per Use Only.” Payment is also post-paid.

It takes no more than 10 minutes to train an Agent to use Kunnect. The administration functions are easy to learn and takes no more than one hour to setup a complete sales campaign. Remember, Kunnect removed the bells and whistles, and while that made Kunnect run more efficiently, it also made using Kunnect very simple.

Kunnect is web-based so Supervisors, Administrators and even owners of call centers can monitor what is happening in the center or office by securely logging into Kunnect and accessing your business data (called a “Tenant” in Kunnect parlance), right at the comforts of their homes or even in the beach. Being browser-based, it means your Kunnect access will also work using Linux or Mac operating systems, besides Windows. You and your center Agents just need simple headsets, USB-based or otherwise, and a downloaded free software called X-Lite to act as your software-phone (or soft-phone). Workspresso began its tests using Intel Celeron-based desktop computers with 256 Megabytes of memory and it worked well on simple call-only campaigns.

When the Makati call center Workspresso was managing decreased the number of licenses, Kunnect immediately credited the deposits made to the current bill and wired the balance to Workspresso within 15 calendar days. That created a huge amount of “trust” with Kunnect concerning the required $200 deposit per license. When it came to the point of increasing back the licenses, there was no worry on our part to pay the upfront deposit fee.

The Kunnect service and support teams from the U.S. and Canada provides its customers with an easy and free way to call them: dial **911 using the soft-phone and it rings any of the available support teams, 24/7. If your internet line is down, you’ll need to call them through the traditional means of international direct dialing.

Kunnect isn’t a byword today because Workspresso and Kunnect didn’t team up at the onset to market something that’s never been used in a Philippine scenario. Workspresso started out as a user before agreeing to help market and sell the hosted solution. You will see no marketing whizbangs — just an honest declaration of what Kunnect has done for Workspresso because of actual experience. Everyone needs assurances. Rather than sell something we only read in brochures and white papers, we answer the questions of interested parties straight from our experience.

So, go with Kunnect today — you won’t regret it!

http://www.kunnect.com